The earthquake's worst blow fell on Esteco - properly Nuestra Señora de Talavera de Madrid, a small Spanish town in what is now Metán department. It was leveled completely. For generations afterward, Esteco lived on in the folklore of northwestern Argentina as a parable: a wealthy, prideful town swallowed by God's judgment, its bells said to ring faintly from beneath the ground. The legend obscured a plainer truth, which archaeologists from Argentina's national research council, CONICET, would later recover. Digging a small trench at the site near the Río Piedras, they uncovered a fragment of wall and one of the four towers of the fort that had guarded the town. The myth had buried real people; the spade brought back the outline of where they had lived.

In the city of Salta, terror turned quickly toward heaven. As the cathedral shook, an image of the Virgin fell some three meters to the floor - and, the people said, came to rest unharmed at the feet of a figure of the crucified Christ. A Jesuit priest, José Carrión, reported hearing a voice during those desperate days: while the image of the Holy Christ remained forgotten in the sacristy, where it had sat since arriving in 1592, the earth would not be still. The crucifix was brought out and carried in procession. The shaking, in time, ceased. To a community that had just buried its dead and watched a neighboring town disappear, that ending was not coincidence. It was deliverance.

On the 8th of October 1692, the Salta town council formally declared the events of those three days miraculous. The Virgin was named advocate of the city; the 13th of September was set apart, and within weeks she was recognized as the city's Patroness under the title Nuestra Señora del Milagro - Our Lady of the Miracle. What began as a terrified vow has endured for more than three centuries. Each year the Fiesta del Milagro builds from early September and culminates in mid-month, when the images of Christ and the Virgin are carried through the streets in an immense procession. It has become the most important religious festival in Salta and one of the largest in all of Argentina, drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who renew, in the words of the tradition, a covenant of faith.

The fault that ruptured in 1692 has never been firmly identified, though geologists have looked hard at the Mojotoro fault east of the city as the likely culprit. The puzzle is more than academic. The northern Lerma Valley remains tectonically active, its surrounding ranges still rising, its ground still capable of the kind of violence Salta knew in 1692 - and felt again in lesser quakes across the centuries that followed. The city that grew up here lives knowingly on restless ground. Its grandest annual gathering is, in the end, a memory of the day that ground betrayed it, and of the thirteen who did not survive.